Seth's Blog

Shocking Tiger Woods video (exclusive)

You should be careful about headlines.

It's pretty easy to write a headline that will get someone to forgive your spam, and perhaps even to open your note (CyberMonday! 85% off...). It's pretty easy to write a headline that will get someone to click through on their RSS reader. It's even easy to write a tweet that will get a click through.

But is it better to get a click and then annoy someone, or better to only reach the people who care?

The mindset of the brazen copywriter is, "well, even if only 1% of the people I trick are actually interested in the content, that's worthwhile. After all, there are a lot of people out there, and offending 99 to get one subscriber or one sale is good math."

The word I use for people like is 'spammer'.

The mindset of the modern marketer is, "I can build a reputation in everything I do. If I teach people to trust me, then over time, I'll conserve their attention and build permission. That's priceless, particularly in a world that's getting more skeptical by the minute."

Of course, the best thing of all is to have content that deserves a great headline. If you can't do that, though, I think you should forgo the headline.

Fore!

Watch the money

"How much life insurance do you have?"

Zig Ziglar liked to say that with that one question, you could tell if someone was a successful life insurance agent. If they're not willing to buy it with their own money, how can they honestly persuade someone else to do so?

If you're in the music business but you never buy tickets or downloads, can you really empathize with the people you're selling to?

My favorite: if you work for a non-profit and you don't give money to charity, what exactly are you doing in this job? I've met some incredibly generous people in the charitable world, but I can also report that a huge number of people—even on the fundraising side—would happily cross the street and risk a beating in order to avoid giving $100 to a cause that's not their own. And the shame of it is that this inaction on their part keeps them from experiencing the very emotion that they try so hard to sell.

Money is more than a transfer of value. It's a statement of belief. An ad agency that won't buy ads, a consultant who won't buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn't tip big—it's a sign, and not a good one.

Getting meta

Wikipedia contains facts about facts. It's a collection of facts from other places.

Facebook doesn't have your friends. It has facts about your friends.

Google is at its best when it gives you links to links, not the information itself.

Over and over, the Internet is allowing new levels of abstraction. Information about information might be worth more than the information itself. Which posts should I read? Which elements of the project are at risk? Who is making the biggest difference to the organization?

Right now, there's way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.

Boundary makers

Some artists continually seek to tear down boundaries, to find new powder, new territory, new worlds to explore. They're the ones that hop the fence to get to places no one has ever been.

Other artists understand that they need to see the edges of the box if they're going to create work that lasts. No fence, no art.

Can't do both at the same time.

My guess is that you're already one kind of person or the other. When people present you with an opportunity/problem, what's your first reaction? Some people immediately start looking for loopholes or weak boundaries. "You didn't say we couldn't do xxx". For these people, the best and most obvious solution is to completely demolish the problem and play by different rules.

Other people, some just as successful, take a hard look at the boundaries and create something that plays within, that follows the rules, but that is likely to win because of this.

In my experience, either can work, but only by someone willing to push harder than most in their push to be remarkable. Going with the flow is a euphemism for failing.

The people you should listen to

Who do you listen to?

Who are you trying to please?

Which customers, relatives, bloggers, pundits, bosses, peers and passers by have influence over your choices? Should the Pulitzer judges decide what gets written, or the angry boss at the end of the hall so influence the products you pitch? Should the buyer at Walmart be the person you spend all your time trying to please? Your nosy neighbor? The angry trolls that write to the newspaper? The customer you never hear from?

Just for a second, think about the influence, buying power, network and track record of the people you listen to the most. Have they earned the right?

The only holiday that really matters

No gifts, no guilt. Universal, even if it's not celebrated on the same day everywhere.

Whenever I sit down at this keyboard, I feel humbled and quite lucky to have the privilege. Every day is Thanksgiving, because without the people we love and depend on, there'd be nothing.

Thanks for being here, for making a difference and for doing work that matters.

Thank you.

Thirsty

I've noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.

I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?

What sort of accent do you have?

Not only the way you speak—but the way you write and act. More than geography, accents now represent a choice of attitude.

Let's define an accent as the way someone speaks (writes, acts) that's different from the way I do it. So, if I'm from Liverpool and you're from Texas, you have an accent, I don't.

Occasionally, an accent is a marketing advantage. Sounding like Sean Connery might be seen as charming in a New York singles' bar, or sounding like a Harvard man might help a neurologist in Miami Beach. Generally, though, if I think you've got an accent, it's more difficult to trust you.

Can your writing have an accent? Of course it can. Not just grammar errors, but sentence length, exclamation marks and your vocabulary all tag you. And the fonts, colors, pictures and layouts you choose are part of your accent as well. Most of us have no trouble at all telling where an ad or a brochure came from (shyster, NY ad firm, home business, church flyer... you get the idea). This blog has an accent, but I've discovered that it's one that most of the people who read it can live with.

And your actions have a grammar as well. When your little mom-and-pop Middle Eastern restaurant has a policy (no substitutions!) even when the place is empty, you're speaking with an accent, aren't you? There's no right accent, no perfect set of rules or actions for you to follow. The choice of accent is directly related to the worldview of the people you're choosing to connect with.

Y'all come back soon, y'hear?

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

You don't charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Delivering blogs via Twitter

You can receive instant daily updates of this blog by following @thisissethsblog.

I create the tweets automatically using a service called twitterfeed. It's free and it works really well. (PS this is my only presence on Twitter... I'm focused on the blog and my books, and alas can't tweet and do that at the same time).

RSS is my preferred way to read and track a lot of blogs. You can subscribe to this blog via RSS by clicking here.

How to lose an argument online

1. Have an argument. Once you start an argument, not a discussion, you've already lost. Think about it: have you ever changed your mind because someone online started yelling at you? They might get you to shut up, but it's unlikely they've actually changed your opinion.
2. Forget the pitfalls of Godwin's law. Any time you mention Hitler or even Communist China or Bill O'Reilly, you've lost.
3. Use faulty analogies. If someone is trying to make a point about, say, health care, try to make an analogy to something conceptually unrelated, like the space shuttle program, and you've lost.
4. Question motives. The best way to get someone annoyed and then have them ignore you is to bypass any thoughtful discussion of facts and instead question what's in it for the person on the other end. Make assumptions about their motivations and lose their respect.
5. Act anonymously. What are the chances that heckled comments from the bleachers will have an impact?
6. Threaten to take action in another venue. Insist that this will come back to haunt the other person. Guarantee you will spread the word or stop purchasing.
7. Bring up the slippery slope. Actually, the slope isn't that slippery. People don't end up marrying dogs, becoming cannibals or harvesting organs because of changes in organization, technology or law.
8. Go to the edges. This is a variant of the slippery slope, in which you bring up extremes at either end of whatever spectrum is being discussed.

So, what works?

Earn a reputation. Have a conversation. Ask questions. Describe possible outcomes of a point of view. Make connections. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. Align objectives then describe a better outcome. Show up. Smile.

The magic rule of seven (and the banality of alphabetical order)

If you approve or create online forms or deal with consumer interactions, I hope you'll think about the following:

1. If you have more than seven items in a pull down list, you have failed.

Human beings have no trouble keeping seven ideas in their head (hence the seven digit phone number). So, if asked you, "what's your favorite kind of music among: polka, reggae, ska, jazz and country" you can probably juggle those ideas in your head all at once. But if I asked you to pick among 25 movies in a list, it's a lot harder, because you have to keep going back and forth to see if you've got it straight.

So, for example, don't give me a list of possible job descriptions and ask what I do. If it's got 60 items on it and there is no direct match (well, I'm sort of in management and sort a writer and sort of in car repair) then my brain freezes over.

Computers are smarter than people. Don't use long lists of multiple choice when a simple fill in the blank will suffice. This is why asking for my state in a pull down list is inane. Just let me type in the two letters. (Hint: that's why Google works. It's fill in the blank, not multiple choice).

2. For non-complete lists, alphabetical order makes no sense

Sure, if you want to list a group in which I'm sure to find what I'm looking for (all the authors on Amazon, say) then alpha is smart. But if you're showing me, for example, a menu of items for dinner, or the names of your kids, then surely there's a sensible way to index them that actually adds value. "Here are the appetizers," makes more sense than putting avocado salad next to almond pudding.

You could, for example, list your items by price, or by popularity. But putting the "Melissa" model slightly above the "Sherwood" is just wasteful.

Benefit of the doubt

It's almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time.

So misunderstandings occur.

We misunderstand a comment or a gesture or a policy or a contract.

And then what happens?

Well, if we're engaged with someone we like or trust, we give them the benefit of the doubt. We either assume that what they actually meant was the thing we expected from someone like them, or we ask about it.

If we're engaged with a stranger or someone we don't trust, we assume the worst.

The challenge, then, is to earn the benefit of the doubt. How many of your customers, prospects, vendors, regulators and colleagues give you the benefit of the doubt?

If you worked at it, could you make that number increase?

The amateur scientist (that's us)

Many people buy a car (probably their single biggest discretionary purchase) based on slamming a door, kicking a tire and judging the handshake of a salesperson.

We choose a surgeon based on the carpeting in his office and a politician by his hair cut.

During the first week of swine flu vaccines in New York, most parents (more than half!) chose to keep their kids out of the program.

Interviewed parents said things like, "I'm not sure it's safe," and "I wanted to see if it affected other kids..."

No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects. No science at all, really, just rumors and hunches and gut instincts.

This gut-instinct approach served people well for hundreds of thousands of years, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't work in a complex world. Eating salmon at a wedding feels 'safe' because we always have, but of course any professional scientist will tell you that farmed salmon is an ecological disaster. You can't see the problem, so you ignore it.

Audiophiles spend thousands of dollars rewiring the electrical lines in their house with .99999% pure copper, ignoring the fact that the power from the street is in the same old cables. Adding decimal points to our irrationality doesn't change much.

The problem with being an amateur scientist is precisely the reason that marketers relish the opportunity to sell to us, the amateurs: we make stupid decisions, easily manipulated by those who might choose to do the manipulation (on their behalf or on ours).

The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions. Armed with Zagats or internet data or some rumor off Snopes, we act as though now we're supremely rational choicemakers.

This is one of the problems with breast cancer screening. It appears to give information, really good information, but in practice, it doesn't. Since the information is vivid, we give it too much credence.

The challenge for people trying to market vaccines or highlight long-term side effects of various consumer choices is that it's much easier to spread a story about exploding cars or hair falling out than it is to spread a story of 'nothing bad happens' or 'no one got the swine flu and died' or 'three years from now, this section of ocean will be dead.' We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in a complex world, is to our detriment.

PS if I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I'd name it after a kid who died last season and put her picture on the release form. Alas, teaching amateurs like us to be real scientists is going to take a while.

Embracing lifetime value

If you walk into a company-owned cell phone store to sign up for a contract, what are you worth?

Given the huge gross margins at AT&T and Verizon and the standard two-year contract, I think it's easy to figure on more than $2000 in lifetime value.

If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off?

Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word--it can easily double or triple the lifetime value.

So, a chiropractor might see a new patient being worth $2,500, easily. And yet... how much is she spending on courting, catering to and seducing that new customer? My guess is that $50 feels like a lot to the doc. Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it's important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Write it down. Post it on the wall. What would happen if you spent 100% of that amount on each of your next ten new customers? That's more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen? Imagine how fast you would grow, how quickly the word would spread.

Here's how you'll know when you've really embraced this--a good customer at your podiatry practice (or supermarket or tax firm) walks out the door in a huff and you turn to your partner and say, "There goes $74,000."

Some books for November

Random thoughts from all over for those of us hungry for new ways to think. This month's list is here.
The previous list was blogged in September.

The reason they want you to fit in...

is that once you do, then they can ignore you.

Breakthroughs and drips

There are only two ways to win in the market.

You can create a breakthrough. A promotion so powerful that people can't help but engage. An innovation so remarkable, people can't help but talk about it. A pricing strategy or ad campaign that breaks the mold and is worthy of attention. This takes huge guts and substantial investment.

Or you can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust. This might take years.

Almost all marketing attempts to do neither of these, and of course, fail. Painless and quick are rarely associated with 'successful.'

Debt, equity and a third thing that might work better

If your business needs money, it seems as though you have two choices:

• Get a loan from a bank
• Raise equity from an investor, giving up part of your company in exchange

Banks are everywhere, so the idea that they can loan us money seems obvious. And venture capitalists and the companies they fund are in the news all the time... and making a billion dollars sounds like fun.

Here's the thing: for most businesses, most of the time, neither is a realistic option.

Banks aren't in the business of taking risk. Which means that they make boring loans to boring companies for boring purposes. They do everything they can to be riskless. Which means you need to guarantee the loan with your house or with assets worth far more than the loan. Which means that a good idea is not a sufficiently good reason for a loan.

And equity? Well there are two problems. The first is that the number of investments that professional VCs can make is microscopically small compared to the number of businesses that want them. A bigger reason is that if there's no obvious and reliable exit strategy (like going public or selling to a huge public company) then there's no rational reason for someone to make an equity loan. The entire upside comes when you sell, and if you can't easily sell (which is most businesses--they're even harder to sell at a profit than a used car) then there's no VC investment to be had.

But that doesn't mean you're stuck. I'd like you to consider the idea of selling part of your income.

It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever.

No fancy bookkeeping, no board meetings, no worrying about the accounting. Instead, you pay a royalty on income. The rest is up to you.

Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.

It could even run on a sliding scale, with early royalties to the investor being lower, or with a buyout once a certain amount was earned back... If you needed $5,000 for some tooling, perhaps you could offer an investor $100 for every unit you sell until you've paid her $10,000, then $40 a unit forever after that. (typos fixed, sorry).

Need to raise money for a restaurant? It's hard for an investor to figure out how to win by owning equity (because it's so easy for the owner of the restaurant to manipulate profit). But if the investor gets 4% of every check paid, that's money back starting on the first day.

Investors are as irrational as the rest of us. They buy a story and expectation about risk. They buy the excitement of upside. They buy an opportunity to turn one thing into another. Banks want a boring story. Other investors might like this alternative story quite a bit.

My general bias for entrepreneurs starting out is to bootstrap their business, because raising money is so hard and so distracting. But if you've set out to do something that needs cash you can't raise any other way, this is worth exploring. Tell a story to an investor that wants to hear it, and create a cash-flow scenario that makes the investment worth it for both of you.

Learning by analogy

Some people are way better at this than others.

The other day, I was talking to someone about a complex and specialized issue. It's quite possible that this was the first and only time in the history of the world that this precise set of circumstances had ever occurred. He said, "do you have an example of how this has worked before for you?"

I was puzzled. I mean, not only hadn't I ever had this precise problem, but no one in the world had.

It's like the left-handed chiropractor in Berkeley wondering how he can use new technologies and marketing techniques wondering why there aren't more case studies about left-handed chiropractors in Berkeley.

Sure, the industries change, the goods/service ratio changes, regulation changes, names change. Doesn't matter. It's all the same. People are people, and basic needs and wants don't vary so much.

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. By the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it's going to be way too late for you to catch up.

Teaching the market a lesson

Some book publishers don't like the Kindle. Either they're afraid of it or they've crunched the numbers and they don't like what they see. (Some days, 95% of the top selling Kindle titles are free... demonstrating that digital goods with zero marginal cost and plentiful substitutes tend to move to zero in price).

Worried about the medium, they hold back, delay or even refuse to support it.

Which is fine if you have market power, but you likely don't. No publisher does, certainly. The Beatles couldn't stop iTunes from changing the record business by sitting out the platform, and there's no book publisher who can stop the Kindle alone.

It's tempting to look at a high-momentum market innovation, something that brings efficiency but leaves change in its wake, and try to stop it single-handedly. Tempting, but not so smart, I think. The market waits for no one.

The alternative to joining in is to sit out the game loudly. Don't just hold back your support, organize your peers. Create a (sometimes illegal) coordinated effort to stop innovation. I'm not going to bet much on your efforts, but it will certainly outperform a solo effort.

Quiet, passive-aggressive whining in the corner is both annoying and ineffective.

Hammer time

So, if it's true that to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the really useful question is, "what sort of hammer do you have?"

At big TV networks, they have a TV hammer. At a surgeon's office, they have the scalpel hammer. A drug counselor has the talk hammer, while a judge probably has the jail hammer.

Maybe it's time for a new hammer...

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated and yes, acupuncturists were sure needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn't symptoms or patient background, it was the background of the doctor.

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you're used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer. And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails. PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases, because, you guessed it, that's their hammer.

It's not just about new vs. old. Inveterate community-focused social media mavens often bring that particular hammer to other venues. So they crowdsource keynote speeches or restaurants or board meetings and can't figure out why they don't have the impact others do.

The best way to find the right tool for the job is to learn to be good at switching hammers.

Can't top this

Getting someone to switch is really difficult.

Getting someone to switch because you offer more of what they were looking for when they choose the one they have now is essentially impossible. For starters, they're probably not looking for more. And beyond that, they'd need to admit that they were wrong for not choosing you in the first place.

So, you don't get someone to switch because you're cheaper than Walmart. You don't get someone to switch because you serve bigger portions than the big-portion steakhouse down the street. You don't get someone to switch because your hospital is more famous than the Mayo Clinic.

The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed.

Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn't think was so important.

Worldview Neuralgia (don't call your customers liars)

If I had to pick a book of mine to recommend that you haven't read yet, it would probably be All Marketers are Liars.

The reason you haven't read it, I'm guessing, is that it has a terrible title and had a worse cover. Lesson learned. All the details are right here on this little sub-blog.

[Two other book updates: Purple Cow now comes with a new appendix, written by you, my readers. The rest of the book remains the same. And the best of the last three years of this blog are now collected in the Kindle-only book called Zen Unicorn.]

Choose your customers, choose your future

Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.

Your customers define what you make, how you make it, where you sell it, what you charge, who you hire and even how you fund your business. If your customer base changes over time but you fail to make changes in the rest of your organization, stress and failure will follow.

Sell to angry cheapskates and your business will reflect that. On the other hand, when you find great customers, they will eagerly co-create with you. They will engage and invent and spread the word.

It takes vision and guts to turn someone down and focus on a different segment, on people who might be more difficult to sell at first, but will lead you where you want to go over time.